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Anyway, here for your bemusement is an animated adaptation of Stardust the Super Wizard's first appearance in (the now public domain comic book) Fantastic Comics #1. I have seen online that maybe he also appeared in one issue of Crash comics, but unfortunately don't know anything about that.

If you're unfamiliar with Fletcher Hanks' work, he's known as "The Ed Wood of comics" and has one of the weirdest imaginations ever to exist in the comics world. He was active for only a few years (1,939-1,940 as far as I know). In the 70s he reportedly froze to death on a park bench. Most of his characters are more powerful than ten Supermen combined, viciously sadistic ironic avengers, and very trippy.

You can get every (known) comic ever made by Fletcher Hanks by ordering two trade paperbacks -- "I shall destroy all the civilized planets" and "You shall die by your own evil creation" (to be released in July). Both are available on Amazon. You can also find most of his comics online for free (as well as MANY other golden age comics). Here's one good comprehensive source: http://goldenagecomics.co.uk

Along with Stardust the Super Wizard, his other most noteworthy creation is "Fantomah," who is arguably the first super heroine to ever appear in comics. She's a jungle girl who's somewhat similar to Stardust in that she's more powerful than... uh, anything you can possibly imagine. But she also has the unique distinction of transforming into a blue skull-faced monster.

If you aren't satisfied with the production values in this "cartoon," please let me know and I'll refund your money. I made this to cheer myself up and figure out how to use Sony Vegas. The animation style is inspired by an old marvel superheroes cartoon from 1,966. This is faster paced than my previous Stardust cartoon and has (relatively) better animation. I noticed that the earlier posting had over 10,000 views, which is also part of why I made this new one. But mainly it was just to cheer myself up.

Stardust is in the public domain, so everyone should make material featuring him -- because he's the greatest superhero in the universe and "the most remarkable man who ever lived." Now that I'm uploading this I can finally stop working on making cartoons and do my Animation school homework (figure drawing) instead.

Hopefully the pace is so fast that you won't notice that once at the end I accidentally refer to the terrorists as a "spy army." In the original they were an "army of spies and terrorists" and this is a holdover from the original dialogue. Americans not really being all that particularly worried about spies these days, I chose to refer to the villains as "terrorists" exclusively (well, okay -- also as "murderous madmen"). This story was originally written in 1,939, which was a different time obviously.

I spared you my attempt at singing in this post in favor of the Hoagy Carmichael whistle, but originally I was going to use this as the end theme "...When Stardust the Super Wizard let's a mighty ray fly through the sky every guy who would try to deny his ray must die..." I'll give you a great big virtual pat on the back if you know what that's in reference to...

And YouTube staff, if you are looking for a video to feature, please note that there are no intellectual property rights violations of any sort in this video. I even licensed the use of the music (paid for it)... except for the Stardust whistle at the end (which is public domain, available from www.archive.org along with a bazillion other public domain audio and video files).

And not to make excuses or anything, but sadly some of the animation in this video actually disappeared when I compressed it to a file size that would upload. Most notably I guess the eye movements were too rapid to be successfully captured in this smaller file size. Oh well... you're not missing that much, I guess.

Also, my interpretation of Stardust's statement "good luck" at the end is that when the terrorists drop after five minutes they won't be neutralized or anything, so I guess the FBI agents will have a fight on their hands...

This video also represents some progress in my secret plan, which is to make videos that are "good enough" for the Internet. Not to sound terrible, but what I want to do is strike a balance between high quality and sustainability so that I can reach a point where all I do is post videos online as a career. To that end I need production values that attract an audience, but aren't so excessive that I am unable to post a video every few days. The production values in this particular video are probably lower than my end goal and the production process of making the video probably took me too long... but anyway, yeah, it's "progress." I'll keep trying.